First egg at 13 weeks!

To our great surprise, we got our first egg today, a lovely pinkish one that we suspect came from one of our Barred Rocks, 13 weeks to the day from when she was hatched.

A couple of our 17 hens had gotten interested in the nest boxes lately and were showing color in their combs and wattles, so we switched them all to Nutrena laying pellets a couple days ago as we were out of feed. All natural feed, no hormones or anything. We also set some wooden eggs in the nest boxes and found one of the BR sitting on them yesterday.

Does this seem WAAAY early to other folks? We weren't expecting eggs for another month, and thought that was optimistic.

We have also raised NH reds and Speckled Sussex, but aren't anticipating anything from them for awhile. We had heard the barred tended to lay earlier, maybe at 18 weeks. But not 13!Edited by TheMallons - 7/18/15 at 11:19am

I have never seen a 13 week old that is mature enough to lay. And I've raised a lot of birds.

ok. I haven't raised that many, so I am interested in your perspective. It certainly seemed early to me. But we didn't have any older chickens. It clearly came from that hen, and she started laying regularly after that. It did make me check my dates!Edited by TheMallons - 10/21/15 at 2:44pm